Education Commons^™

Session A-2: Encountering Ourselves: American Indians And The Age Of Revolution, Claiborne Skinner

Claiborne A. Skinner Jr.

This session will explore how Europeans who encountered the indigenous peoples of North America came to see them as a window into their own past. This provided philosophers and political theorists with a means by which to critique Baroque civilization. The result was Locke's "Natural Law," and Rousseau's Noble Savage." The notion that the world had moved away from freedom and liberty by becoming civilized became a potent argument for both the American and French Revolutions.